Archive for
April, 2008

This week I split Pentaho Metadata and its Editor into two separate projects. Before this split, we built a single metadata jar file that contained both UI code and core library code. With this split, we now have a separate jar for the core library, which will be deployed to the Pentaho BI Server and other dependent projects. The original jar file was close to 1.5MB, now the library only jar is around 374K.

This split also resolves a circular project dependency that was created when we separated out the Metadata Query Language (MQL) Editor. In order to properly build Pentaho Metadata, one would have to first build the main project, deploy the jar to the MQL Editor, and then check in the new MQL Editor jar back into the main Metadata project and build again. Now we no longer have this circular dependency. First the core library is built, followed by the MQL Editor, and then finally the Metadata Editor is built.

You can access the latest Pentaho Metadata Library, Pentaho Metadata Editor, and Pentaho MQL Editor via SVN following these three links:

I just got back from spending the week in Santa Clara, California at the MySQL Conference. I really enjoyed spreading the word about Open Source Business Intelligence. Many folks attending the conference were new to Business Intelligence and Pentaho, so I enjoyed demoing our products, showing off Adhoc Querying with Metadata and building Transformations with Kettle.

I was very impressed with Marten Mickos and Jonathan Schwartz’s keynotes. Both focused on the value and benefits of Open Source technology. Marten celebrated the MySQL community by recognizing some of the top community contributors of MySQL, and Jonathan discussed the big picture of how Sun powered by Open Source can change the world.

Other great highlights included Lance Walter giving a talk on Operational Business Intelligence, and Julian Hyde discussing Interactive OLAP, which included a demo of Halogen. To cap off the week, I visited my good friend Dan Morrill at the Googleplex and got a tour of their wonderfully creative environment, including pin ball machines and space ships!

Aaron Phillips, one of our newest Senior Engineers at Pentaho, introduced the team to Hudson this week. Hudson’s main purpose is to build and test software projects continuously. It’s easy to install, and from the web UI it’s possible to configure new projects very easily. Aaron demonstrated this by quickly setting up Hudson on a virtual machine, and then showing off its capabilities by building Pentaho Metadata, showing successful JUnit test percentages and code coverage reports from Cobertura.

If you have a need to build a Java project continuously, and want to monitor unit test and code coverage changes over time, you should definitely take a look at Hudson. I’m very impressed.

Michael Tarallo, Doug Moran, and I attended and presented at BarCamp Orlando today. Despite a bit of a down pour, we all had a great time and got to meet a lot of developers here in Orlando and all across the continent. Some of the interesting talks I attended included a demo of Izea’s SocialSpark from Peter Wright, and a rant on Web 2.0 from Sunir Shah of FreshBooks, and of course Doug’s and Michael’s great intro to Pentaho. Robert Dempsey of Atlantic Dominion Solutions gave an after lunch talk on Scrum, and later I followed it up with a talk on Scrum at Pentaho and Open Scrum. Check out slides of my presentation in pdf.